a moment a head was protruded. A lithe body wriggled out. It was a snake of a light grey colour, and over each eye was a horn. It lay slightly curled.
“Do you recognise it?” said Oliver in a low voice to the doctor.
“I do.”
The charmer sat motionless, and the woman in the dim background ceased her weird rubbing of the drum. Haddo seized the snake and opened its mouth. Immediately it fastened on his hand, and the reptile teeth went deep into his flesh. Arthur watched him for signs of pain, but he did not wince. The writhing snake dangled from his hand. He repeated a sentence in Arabic, and, with the peculiar suddenness of a drop of water falling from a roof, the snake fell to the ground. The blood flowed freely. Haddo spat upon the bleeding place three times, muttering words they could not hear, and three times he rubbed the wound with his fingers. The bleeding stopped entirely. He stretched out his hand for Arthur to look at.
“That surely is what a surgeon would call healing by first intention,” he said.
Burdon was astonished, but he was irritated, too, and would not allow that there was anything strange in the cessation of the flowing blood.
“You haven’t yet shown that the snake was poisonous.”
“I have not finished yet,” smiled Haddo.
He spoke again to the Egyptian, who gave an order to his wife. Without a word she rose to her feet and from a box took a white rabbit. She lifted
